Your typical innovation process starts with lots of customer interviews, lots of sticky notes, lots of surveys — and a mound of data that's more often mind-numbing than insightful. "With normal research, you can see opportunities," says Rinat Aruh, co-founder of the design firm Aruliden. "But just knowing that an opportunity is there isn't going to actually inspire you." So instead, Aruliden frequently works with kids, asking them to build mock-ups of their own dream products.

If there’s one accessory that looks horribly out of a place in a minimalist home, it’s a fish tank decked out with plastic accessories. Which is kind of a shame, since a fish is one of the few pets that won’t wreck the Mies van der Rohe daybed.

If there’s one accessory that looks horribly out of a place in a minimalist home, it’s a fish tank decked out with plastic accessories. Which is kind of a shame, since a fish is one of the few pets that won’t wreck the Mies van der Rohe daybed. The designers at New York–based Aruliden have reinvented the lowly fishbowl, transforming it into a hand-blown glass sculpture almost worthy of display in the Farnsworth House.

Which school nabbed a top prize at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair? No, not RISD or Pratt but rather the School at Columbia and its team of eighth-graders, who took it upon themselves to reinvent their classroom — a space that has evolved little since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

Which school nabbed a top prize at this year's International Contemporary Furniture Fair? No, not RISD or Pratt but rather the School at Columbia and its team of eighth-graders, who took it upon themselves to reinvent their classroom — a space that has evolved little since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

Your typical innovation process starts with lots of customer interviews, lots of sticky notes, lots of surveys — and a mound of data that's more often mind-numbing than insightful. "With normal research, you can see opportunities," says Rinat Aruh, co-founder of the design firm Aruliden. "But just knowing that an opportunity is there isn't going to actually inspire you." So instead, Aruliden frequently works with kids, asking them to build mock-ups of their own dream products.